Your Brain at Work

The Brain at Google

David Rock — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:54:07 +0000

Like most people who use a computer, I have long been fascinated with Google. Google search seems to know exactly what I want before even I know it. I loved recently discovering by accident that it will do math for you (try it!).

As someone who focuses on improving organizational cultures, I have also long been fascinated by Google the company. And so I was most excited to go to their HQ recently and give a talk as part of the Google 'Tech Talk' series. The talk itself involved how to maximize internal data processing. In other words, how to ramp up the amount of information you process each day. The talk was a summary of the big ideas in 'Your Brain at Work', and you can watch the whole video here on YouTube.

What I discovered on this visit was that Google do appear to understand a lot about human nature, and they apply these findings to how they run their company. Some of their more quirky ideas, while being sometimes laughed about in the media, are actually based in science. Here's what I came to discover on my tour of the Googleplex.

The Club Med of corporations
Having two young children, I found to my horror recently that I was going to a Club Med for one of our family vacations. A day or so into the holiday I discovered something surprising. The formula at Club Med is to include pretty much everything in the price, activities, food, even drinks, giving you fewer decisions to make. Now I know the research on decision making, and how making any conscious decision uses a measurable amount of glucose, but I wasn't prepared for how relaxing it was not having to think anywhere near as much, even about simple things. It turned out to be a remarkably restful holiday.

Google have realized this same thing. When you work at Google, you get to save your limited mental resoures for the most important decisions. As Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said, "Let’s face it: programmers want to program, they don’t want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.”

At Google's headquarters in Mountain View, there's not just laundry facilities, there's also a gym, fitness classes, massage therapy, a hair stylist and medical support. There's also car wash, oil change,and even bike repair. All thrown in. Employees are able to focus much more on their work, because they don't have to focus on other distractions. Distractions, as I wrote about a while back, are suprisingly tiring. Other companies could do well to do the same, noticing what their employees end up wasting their attention on, and doing something about it. It is sure making me rethink my own company's benefits policies.

The outcome? As far as I could tell from my half day there, the vibe was not the 'bunkered down, geek-in the-dark-room' type company. People seemed sincerely passionate about their work, in a way you normally only see in small start ups or family companies. Of course, working at Google would give you a 'status high', and they do hire smart people. Yet as someone who visits several companies every week, there was something different in the air. It may have been the fact that they have a policy of never being more than 100 feet away from a food station, a policy which turns out to be very useful when you are chewing up glucose thinking hard all day. Or perhaps it is more than that.

Attention is a limited (and valuable) resource
I think that the leadership at Google has an intuitive understanding of human nature, and the way attention is a limited resource. By minimizing distractions (and keeping up their glucose,) Google employees get to do more of what they want, which is to create cool things, and that's inherently rewarding. New ideas, new connections are energizing.

In their search business, Google knows the power of shaving milliseconds off the time people have to pay attention to something. It is applying the same principle to it's employees - respecting attention as a limited resource. I suspect that Google's founders pay a lot of attention to attention. Metacognition, as it is called, or thinking about thinking, is something that individuals can do. It improves the integration of the brain, making you more adaptive. It may be an asset at an organizational level too.

Happy, in-control employees are more flexible thinkers
As well as minimizing distractions and respecting attention, Google does other things to help their people be more productive, in particular being more productive at complex problem solving. There is some very good research showing that people experiencing happy emotions solve more problems, especially ones that require non-linear thinking. Mark Beeman has done some great research on the brain around this, showing 'positive mood alters preparatory activity in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, biasing participants to engage in processing conducive to insight solving. This result suggests that positive mood enhances insight, at least in part, by modulating attention and cognitive control mechanisms via ACC, perhaps enhancing sensitivity to detect non-prepotent solution candidates.' In other words, when you are happy, you are more able to notice subtle signals, the tickle at the back of your mind with a possible solution to a problem. At Google I noticed this first hand: During my talk I gave the group a puzzle I've given to several thousand other smart people, at some of the leading investment banks and other top firms around the US. Normally I may get at best one person out of 100 solve this puzzle. It is an insight puzzle that requires flexible thinking. At Google, they answered all the puzzles as fast as I could read them out, with many in the group calling out the answers. (You can see this occur live in the video.) I don't think it is just raw intelligence, its an openness to thinking differently, which requires something as basic as feeling generally happy.

In my final moments visiting the site, as I had a free ice cream from the freezer, I looked outside and something wonderful caught my eye. On one whole side of the building, instead of planting the usual shrubs to make the buiding look nice, there were hundreds of strawberry plants. It takes happy people to think like this, and it sure made me feel happy to see it.

Increasing happiness (and therefore innovation) requires subtle levers
I am often asked to help companies develop a more innovative culture, and here was a company where innovation was off the charts. But I think it is more than just innovation being encouraged. I don't think the beach volleyball courts, table tennis tables and chill out areas do all that much to make people happy, the culture emerges from more subtle levers. And happiness at Google is not a function of a 'lack of stress' - people at Google are under pressure, working hard, doing long hours, and dealing with the many challenges of running a global organization. They even had budget cuts recently. So, what is different at Google?

I think the difference is that Google have worked out how to offset the threat response inherent in hard work with a range of deep rewards. These rewards are intangible and subtle, and many companies miss their importance. First there is the sense of autonomy and control that googlers experience, through having access to basic services that normally distract one from life. They literally drop their laundry off in the morning and pick it up that day, and don't have to think about it. The company also respects issues of fairness , you can see it in the details of their hiring policies and their truly diverse workforce. A sense of fairness can be deeply rewarding for the brain. There is also a strong feeling of relatedness created across the group, whether its the large food hall where everyone eats together, the open lay out of the buildings or the various activities that googlers do together. (I heard that one of the founders still plays beach volleyball in the courtyard with everyone regularly.)

Between having high status from working for a leading global firm, the extra certainty that comes from working for a large firm, a high degree of autonomy, a sense of relatedness and fairness, Google has managed to tap into all five of the major drivers of rewards in the brain. They have hit the jackpot of the SCARF model, where people are challenged, but feel in control and rewarded daily by their work (There's more on this in an article called 'Managing with the brain in mind'.)

When it comes to creating positive organizational cultures, small things may count more than we realize. Work is by nature stressful, and the more that companies can offset that stress (a threat response), by tapping into the brain's own reward systems, the more engaged and effective people can be. Google is not a great company just because of a great search product, it is innovating all the way down to how it organizes, engages and rewards its people. The result is one of the most successful companies in history.

(Not So Great) Expectations

David Rock — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:44:27 +0000

I have an apology to make to anyone who has been reading my posts weekly. By posting on the same day every week for a while I created an expectation that this week I didn't meet, and this may have upset your limbic system. Sorry about that!

The brain is finely tuned to expectations, and an expectation that isn't met, no matter how seemingly unimportant, can sometimes pack a punch. This stands out a lot with young children, who can lose the plot at the smallest unmet expectation (not having one more expected cookie can send a 4 four year old into a total tizz.) Unmet expectations can pack a punch for adults, too. Here's why.

Dopamine and expectations
The best brain research on expectations comes from Professor Wolfram Schultz at Cambridge University in England. Schultz studies the links between dopamine and the reward circuitry. Dopamine cells sit deep within the brain, in the nucleus accumbens, and fire off in anticipation of primary rewards. Schultz found that when a cue from the environment indicates you're going to get a reward, dopamine releases in response. Unexpected rewards release more dopamine than expected ones. Thus, the surprise bonus at work, even a small one, can positively impact your brain chemistry more than an expected pay rise.

However, if you're expecting a reward and you don't get it, dopamine levels fall steeply. This feeling is not a pleasant one, it feels a lot like pain. Expecting a pay rise and not getting one can create a funk that lasts for days. However, low levels of unmet expectations are something we all experience constantly: expect the lights to change and find they take a long time and your dopamine levels fall, leaving you feeling frustrated. Expect the service at the bank to be fast but find a long queue, more frustration. Not only does dopamine go down in these instances, you also get a mild threat response, reducing prefrontal functioning for deliberate tasks.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of desire. Dopamine levels rise when you want something, even something as simple as wanting to cross the road. (Dopamine is a driver of the reward response in most of the animal kingdom too. At last, we know the real reason the chicken wanted to cross the road...it was craving a burst of dopamine!) Put simply, dopamine is central to the toward state, to being open, curious, and interested.

The number of connections made per second in the brain is also connected to dopamine levels. A hit of cocaine dramatically increases dopamine levels, with people chaotically jumping between ideas as the number of connections per second increases. When dopamine levels are too low, the number of connections per second in the brain falls. The movie "Awakenings" with Robin Williams illustrated the story of a patient who went from comatose to manic, after being given a dopamine-producing agent, L-dopa. When the L-dopa stopped, the patient plummeted back into a comatose state.

The dopamine cells in the nucleus accumbens connect to many parts of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, where the right levels of dopamine are critical for focusing. You need good levels of dopamine to "hold" an idea in your prefrontal cortex. Positive expectations increase the levels of dopamine in the brain, and these increased levels make you more able to focus. This makes sense intuitively: teachers know that kids learn best when they are interested in a subject. Interest, desire, and positive expectations are slight variations on a similar experience, an experience of having an increased level of dopamine in the brain.

The link between expectations, dopamine and perception may explain why happiness is a great state for mental performance and problem solving. Lots of research has been done, such as by Barbara Frederickson from the University of North Carolina, showing that happy people perceive a wider range of data, solve more problems and come up with more new ideas for actions to take in a situation. Perhaps the elusive search for happiness is really a search for the right levels of dopamine. From this perspective, to create a ‘happy' life perhaps you should live a life with a good amount of novelty, create opportunities for unexpected rewards, and believe that things are always going to get slightly better.

Creating the right expectations
Whether your goal is to be eternally happy, or just improve your performance at work, clearly it's going to be useful to improve how you manage expectations, to create the right levels of dopamine. To be clear, I am not an advocate of consuming L-dopa, cocaine, or any other substance that induces greater dopamine levels. The best way to manage your expectations (without any side effects) is to start to pay attention to them. Managing your expectations is also an opportunity to be more proactive in the way you regulate emotions, setting the scene for good performance rather than just sorting out problems when things go wrong.

Unmet expectations are one of the important experiences to avoid, as these generate the stronger threat response. Great leaders carefully manage expectations to avoid not meeting them. When Barack Obama was sworn in as the new US president in 2009, he took care to ensure people reduced their expectations both of him and the years ahead.

Consciously altering what you expect can have a surprising impact. Imagine you are trying to get an upgrade for a long international flight. If you keep your expectations low, you will either be okay if you don't get the reward, or thrilled if you do. Whereas if you allow yourself to get excited about the possible upgrade, you will either have a terrible flight if you don't get the upgrade, or only be quietly happy, though not thrilled, if you do get it. When you step back and look at all the possible outcomes this way, it makes sense to minimize one's expectations of positive rewards in most situations. Keeping an even keel about potential wins pays off.

As well as making sure you keep your expectations low, another way to boost your mood is to pay additional attention to positive expectations you know will be met for sure. A colleague recently said, "I like to use the fact that I have a holiday coming up, even if it's months away, to help me be positive. If I focus on this, though it's not logical, I have learned this helps keep the doldrums away." Choosing to focus on things always getting a little bit better, even with evidence at times to the contrary, helps you maintain good levels of dopamine.

The 'P Principle'
There's another way expectations appear to impact experience. This one is entirely unscientific -- I have no evidence whatsoever for this idea, except personal experience. However, there's an idea I call the ‘P Principle'. Simply put, the closer you get to the rest room, the more desperate you get to pee. It seems too miraculous that you always ‘just make it'. What perhaps happens is that expecting something to end makes you need it to end ASAP. So, if you're going a little nuts this time of year too, a month or so away from a holiday, don't worry, it's not you, it's probably just your brain.

Want to read more? Check out my new book 'Your Brain at Work' - recently listed as one of the top 10 best-selling business books in the US. Or stay in touch via Twitter.

Fair Play

David Rock — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:20:22 +0000

Recently, while finishing up delivering a talk in Silicon Valley, I found myself struck by a deep sense of dread. I hadn't brought enough copies of hand out materials for the unexpectedly large group. This meant that at any moment a small mob of otherwise friendly people might turn against me, driven to expressing mild rage from a sense of unfairness. It was enough to put me on edge for some time until I labeled what was going on.

Fairness is the fifth and final domain of threat or reward I have written up in a series of posts, the others being Status, Certainty, Autonomy and Relatedness. These five ideas together make up the 'SCARF' model that has become a popular way of thinking about what happens in the brain during social situations. In later posts I will go further into the implications of the whole model, and how it relates to management, creating change, bringing up kids and other issues.

Fairness is a primary reward or threat
The fact that being treated unfairly can generate a strong threat response is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone. However what may be a surprise is that a sense of fairness can also be rewarding, in and of itself, and significantly so. Fairness, it turns out, is another primary threat or reward: the experience activates the same network that monitors real pain and pleasure.

Prime your brain to look out for fairness issues and they start to appear everywhere. Political clashes, both verbal and violent, tend to be driven by fairness issues. I recently turned on the television to see a villager in Africa shouting that she was willing to die to right the injustice of an unfairly rigged election. Fairness-generated emotions can run high in more mundane situations too: the feeling of being "taken advantage of" by a taxi driver taking a longer route can wreck an otherwise great day, despite the relatively insignificant money involved. It's the principle that counts. The legal system is deeply about fairness. Think of people who spend enormous sums of money to "right wrongs" in court, with no obvious economic win other than "justice". (In the UK the department that looks after the courts is called the ‘Ministry of Justice'. It could be called the ‘Ministry of Fairness' in some ways.) We crave fairness, and some people risk their life savings and even their lives to get it.

Fairness can be more rewarding than money
Golnaz Tabibnia, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, studies fairness and the way people make judgments about it. "The tendency to prefer equity and resist unfair outcomes is deeply rooted in people," Tabibnia explains. One of Tabibnia's studies, in collaboration with Matt Lieberman, uses an exercise called the "Ultimatum Game." In the Ultimatum Game, there are two people, who receive a pot of money to split between themselves and the other person. One person makes a proposal and the other person has to decide whether to accept the proposal or not. If they don't accept the proposal, neither of them gets a reward. "'Inequity aversion' is so strong", Tabibnia explains, "that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome."

Surprisingly, when people receive five dollars out of ten dollars, their reward center lights up more than when they receive, say, five dollars out of twenty. ‘In other words, the reward circuitry is activated more when an offer is fair than when it's unfair, even when there is no additional money to be gained,' Tabibnia explains. Fairness, it seems, can be more important than money.

Fairness doesn't intuitively feel like it is of the same importance as say food or sex. Because of this, many people don't tend to value fairness highly enough, and can be blindsided by the intensity of a fairness response. This is another example of Maslow perhaps being wrong. Society values survival needs such as food, well before social issues like fairness. As a result, someone planning a day-long team meeting might pay attention to ensuring everyone has a good lunch break, but forget all about people's perception of fairness around how the day is organized. More and more research points to the idea that distractions from a sense of unfairness could be harder to handle than an empty stomach.

Fair play
Neuroscientist Stephen Pinker has a theory about where this intense response to fairness comes from, outlined in his book How the Mind Works. Pinker thinks that the fairness response has emerged as a by-product of the need to trade efficiently. In your evolutionary past, when you couldn't store food in the refrigerator, the best place to store resources would have been by giving "favors" to others. Resources were stored in other people's brains, as potential reciprocal snacks down the road. This mental exchange was especially important in hunter-gatherer days, when protein sources arrived intermittently: a bison felled by one person would be too much meat just for his family. To be good at this kind of trading you need the ability to detect "cheaters," people who promise but don't deliver. In this way, people with strong fairness-detectors would have evolutionary advantages.

These days, with fridges and bank accounts, you don't need to trust other people in such a primal way. Your fairness detecting circuits are still there, but now they tend to get more of a work out in the form of leisure activities, such as the game of "cheat" played by kids, or Texas Hold-Em poker, played by millions of adults the world over. These games provide an opportunity to flex your cheating and cheater-detecting muscles. While fairness in real life can generate a threat or a reward, detecting unfairness can be fun for the whole family.

When it's just not fair
Perceiving unfairness generates intense arousal of the limbic system, with all the attendant challenges this brings. As one example, because of the generalizing effect, accidental connections become easier: if you think one person is being unfair, everyone else may seem to be acting unfairly too. Many arguments between people, especially those close to us, involve incorrect perceptions of unfairness, triggering events that activate an even deeper sense of unfairness in all parties. This often starts by someone misreading one person's intent, being slightly mind-blind for a moment. The result can be an intense downward spiral, driven by accidental connections and one's expectations then altering perception.

Since unfairness packs a hefty punch, it's easy to get upset by small injustices when you're tired, or when your limbic system already has a strong base load of arousal. One study showed that the amount of seratonin in the blood, which is involved in feeling content, determined how people reacted to unfair situations. When you feel low contentment, you can have a strong response to unfairness. You have to be extra careful in these situations. If you are kept awake by young children, it's easy to get cranky with a partner asking you for help. If you've had a big day at the office, it's easier to get unnecessarily annoyed with a supplier who you think might be ripping you off, even though it might only be for pennies.

Fairness comes up a lot when dealing with children. "Do as I say, not as I do" is a statement parents wish they could use, but kids are finely attuned to fairness from an early age.

Justice is it's own reward
On the plus side, fairness is hedonically rewarding, activating dopamine cells deep in the brain, like a good meal or an unexpected bonus at work. The feeling you get from a sense of fairness is one of connecting safely with others, so it's linked to relatedness. When you feel someone is being fair, there is a feeling of increased trust. Studies show that a self-rated sense of trust and cooperation increase when people experience fair offers. Oxytocin levels increase in fair exchanges too, and oxytocin increases levels of reported trust in people.

When you experience fairness, the increasing levels of dopamine and oxytocin help generates an overall 'toward' emotional state. As a result you become more open to new ideas and more willing to connect with other people. This is a great state for collaboration with others. Yet so many structures inside organizations, especially large organizations, work against employees feeling a sense of fairness. Think of the all too common complaints about pay, performance, and transparency. In the big downsizings of 2009, one firm's executives agreed to a pay cut of 15%, making a big deal that this was three times more than the 5% cut all staff were being asked to undergo, to help reduce layoffs. While a 15% cut meant thousands of dollars a year less pay for an executive, this didn't affect their bonuses, which were worth millions of dollars. You can imagine how employees felt about that when word got around.

One interesting implication of fairness research is the idea that workplaces that truly allow employees to experience an increasing perception of fairness might be intrinsically rewarding. This may explain why people perform better in certain workplace cultures. I asked one executive I shared a can ride with why he had stayed at the same company for 22 years. ‘I don't know' he replied. ‘I guess it's because they always seem to do their best to do the right thing by everyone'. Organizations trying to increase a sense of engagement could do well to recognize that people experiencing a sense of unfairness may get as upset (and therefore distracted). as being told they wont get to eat for a day.

There is research on corporate restructuring showing that when people understood that downsizing decisions were made fairly, the impact of the downsizing was dramatically less. On the other hand, people who feel themselves to be treated unfairly by an organization can generate no end of complaints. Living in a world that appears unfair impacts people's cortisol levels, their well-being, and even their longevity. No wonder so many people won't stay in corporate jobs when they think that their company isn't doing the "fair thing" for its workers, customers or for the community at large.

There is one place you can go to experience a regular increase in the sense of fairness, and that's to work for social-justice organizations that distribute food to the poor or generally serve under-privileged communities. When you right perceived wrongs, like people being hungry when there's food being wasted two blocks away, you increase your sense of fairness. Organizations that allow people to take time on community projects are letting their employees feel rewarded by increasing their sense of fairness.

In summary, a sense of fairness is not just a nice to have if you want to be able to think clearly, collaborate, learn or influence others. Without a sense of fairness, people experience a degree of distraction from a threat response, that inhibits their ability to focus. Ignore fairness issues at your peril.

A sense of autonomy is a primary reward or threat for the brain

David Rock — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:05:29 +0000

This is the fourth in a series of five posts about the big drivers of threat and reward in the brain. So far I have posted about status, certainty and relatedness. This week let's explore the issue of autonomy. Autonomy is a feeling of having choices. This feeling turns out to be deeply upsetting when taken away from us.

Teen angst is not universal
According to Dr. Robert Epstein, teenagers in western cultures have fewer choices than a felon in prison. They can't drink, vote, have sex, marry, or choose where they go. I am not saying teens should be given total autonomy, they would probably make some pretty bad decisions. Yet I think some societies have gone overboard with control. (Note that the ‘terrible teens' is not a biological necessity, as many cultures don't experience this phenomenon.) In the US we have one of the older drinking ages worldwide - hundreds of countries allow drinking at 16 or 18. In Italy you can drink at any age. I was recently in a town square with 2,000 young people in Italy, at the University I teach at. There were live bands and dozens of bars in the square. In many countries this would be a recipe for violence, yet here I felt totally safe - people were controlling their drinking, yes even 17 year olds.

A sense of autonomy is not a 'nice to have'
Autonomy is not just something that teens crave, a sense of autonomy is a big driver of reward or threat at all ages. Steve Maier at the university of Boulder says that the degree of control that organisms exert over something, determines whether or not the stressor alters an organism's functioning. His findings indicate that only uncontrollable stress cause damaging effects. Uncontrollable stress can be destructive, whereas the same stress that feels escapable is less destructive, significantly so. Steven Dworkin, at the University of North Carolina, studies the way rats are affected by drugs. In one study, a rat gives itself cocaine directly into the brain by pressing a lever. The rat eventually dies from lack of food and sleep. Yet when a second rat gets cocaine at the same time as the first, but not of its own volition, it dies much faster. The difference is a perception of control (or so scientists think, the rats don't say much.)

And there's more. A study of British Civil Servants found that low-level, non-smoking employees had more health problems than senior executives. This doesn't make sense intuitively, as senior executives experience a lot of stress. A perception of choice may be more important than diet and other factors for health. Many people report "work life balance" as the reason for starting their own business. Yet small business owners often work more hours, for less money, than in corporate life. The difference? Being able to make one's own choices. Another study found that the number of deaths was significantly reduced in a retirement home compared to a control group when people were given three additional choices about their environment.

Amy Arnsten studies the effects of limbic system arousal on prefrontal cortex functioning. She summarized the importance of a sense of control for the brain during an interview filmed at her lab at Yale. "The loss of prefrontal function only occurs when we feel out of control. It's the prefrontal cortex itself that is determining if we are in control or not. Even if we have the illusion that we are in control, our cognitive functions are preserved." This perception of being in control is a major driver of behavior.

Why a lack of autonomy may affect teens so much
With the teenage brain, small emotional hits can bring strong reactions. Prefrontal cortex functioning tends to shrink briefly as teens hit puberty: a ten year old may have better emotional control than a fifteen year old. Prefrontal functioning recovers in late teens and reaches an adult state only in the early twenties. (One theory for why the teen brain seems to go backwards for a while is that in the past, teenagers who did irrational things, like having children, passed on their genes more than people who exhibited self-control.) Because of their poor emotional regulation capacity, teens tend to feel threats and rewards intensely. Where an adult might feel slightly annoyed at being told what to do, but then regulate their emotions, a teenager does not have a well developed braking system, and emotions can get out of control. Perhaps this explains both the door-slamming arguments teens have with their parents, along with their influx into social justice projects.

The take away for parents? Find ways to allow kids, within reason, to feel that they have some kind of choice, even if it's minimal. 'My way or the highway' isn't really choice, and you can't be too flexible, but a middle ground is sometimes possible, and very helpful. One man told me he was having a terrible time with his teen daughter, who wouldn't do what he asked with her pocket money, and was always spending it without covering her cell phone bill. After thinking about this issue of autonomy, he tried out a new strategy: giving her permission to spend her money on anything she liked, as long as she paid the phone bill first. Their relationship dramatically improved from this one small change.

This idea of the importance of autonomy is easy to test on younger children. When a child won't go to bed, you might reduce their resistance by giving them back a choice. They can choose whether they are read a book or are told a story. This choice can have a big impact. It's the "perception" of choice that matters to the brain, as Arnsten explained.

Autonomy at work
In the workplace it's not always possible to give people a lot of autonomy: there are products to sell and processes to follow. The very act of going to work for a firm is an automatic reduction in autonomy - you don't have control over your time any more. (An ex monk, who now works in organizations, thinks the monastery is more free than the average company, at least there he could drink!) However with a little creativity you can give people the perception of autonomy. Instead of defining the exact process someone has to follow, try defining the end result really clearly, and outlining the boundaries of what behaviors are okay, then let people create within this frame. Autonomous decisions are decisions people will get behind. The idea of workplace engagement has autonomy at the core. I wrote more about this in a recent paper called 'Managing with the Brain in Mind' published in a business journal.

A perception of reduced autonomy — for example, because of being micromanaged — can easily generate a threat response. When an employee experiences a lack of control, or agency, his or her perception of uncertainty is also aroused, further raising stress levels. By contrast, the perception of greater autonomy increases the feeling of certainty and reduces stress. Leaders who want to support their people’s need for autonomy must give them latitude to make choices, especially when they are part of a team or working with a supervisor.

The big take away from this: for yourself, find ways you can make choices, and stress is reduced. If all you can do is choose your response to an event, that can still be useful. And with influencing others, whether your employees or your kids, find ways that people can perceive they have choices, and they will be more likely to at least take action rather than look at you blankly, or worse, slam their bedroom door.

What do halloween, the NY marathon and chocolate have in common?

David Rock — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:47:25 +0000

The connnection between halloween and chocolate is pretty obvious, but where does a marathon fit in? To understand this connection you may have to have been where I was today, at the race in Central Park, watching runners lurch toward the finish line. "It's the best drug I've ever had," one runner said to me after the race. "What, the runner's high?" I asked? "No, all the people clapping and cheering, for hours, he said. "I've never felt so deeply connected to the human race."

Cleary a part of the thrill of the race is a sense of increased status, of being noticed and appreciated by so many people, which as I wrote about recently, is deeply rewarding for the brain. It was amazing to see how many people went to a lot of effort to spend their whole day cheering on complete strangers - shouting themselves horse over megaphones, ringing bells, playing horns. It must feel great to be on the receiving end of all this.

High on relatedness
I propose there's something other than just status at play at a race like this. The reward people experienced from Halloween and the race comes from a sense of increased relatedness. Relatedness is another domain which the brain keeps track of, using the same circuitry activated when we think about or eat chocolate. (Relatedness is also one of the five major goals the brain appears to have, that I am writing about over 5 weeks at the moment.)

A feeling of relatedness is a primary reward for the brain, and an absence of relatedness generates a primary threat. A feeling of relatedness is what you get when you feel like you belong in a group, when you are with others of your ‘in group'. At Halloween, this expanded from a few people you say 'hi' to normally in your neighbourhood, to hundreds of people you don't normally speak to. Everyone was suddenly 'in it together', sharing a common experience. At the race, this expanded, as a runner, to every person you saw in the race and in the crowd, which now expanded to tens of thousands. Runners get on a 'relatedness high'.

Friend or foe?
Just as the brain automatically classifies situations into possible reward or threat, it does the same with people, determining, subconsciously, whether each person you meet is either a friend or foe. Are they someone you want to spend more time with (walk toward if you see them on the street) or stay away from (cross the road if you see them coming). And here's the rub: People you don't know tend to be classified as foe until proven otherwise.

It turns out that which kind of people you are surrounded by has a big impact on brain functioning. You use one set of brain circuits for thinking about people whom you believe are like you, whom you feel are a friend, and a different set for those whom you view as different to you, a foe. When your brain decides someone is a friend, you process your interactions using a similar part of the brain you use for thinking about your own experience. And when people in your in group experience pain, you relate to this using a different bran region than when people are in your out group.

Friends are not just a 'nice to have'
Having many positive social connections (eg., a sense of relatedness) doesn't just increase your happiness, it can even help you live longer. John T. Cacioppo, a professor at the University of Chicago, led a study of 229 people between 50 and 68 years old. He found d a 30-point difference in blood pressure between those who experienced loneliness and those with healthy social connections. Loneliness, the study showed, could significantly increase the risk of death from stroke and heart disease. As Cacioppo tried to understand the data, he realized that loneliness might be more important than society generally realizes. "Loneliness generates a threat response," Cacioppo explains, "the same as pain, thirst, hunger, or fear." Being connected to others in a positive way, feeling a sense of relatedness, is a basic need for human beings, similar to eating and drinking. For those of you who think that "hell is other people", remember that social isolation is not the brain's desired state. Having friends around you reduces a deeply ingrained, biological threat response. Being surrounded by thousands of people your brain perceives as friends, well that seems to be so rewarding, people are willing to take extreme pain to experience it. The reason may be the reward function involved, which turns out to be quite an intense experience.

The neurochemistry of safety?
When you interconnect your thoughts, emotions and goals with other people in your in group, you release of oxytocin, a pleasurable chemical. It's the same chemical experience that a small child gets when it makes physical contact with its mother.

In a paper published in "Nature" in June 2005, a group of scientists found that giving people a spray containing oxytocin increased their levels of trust. The paper reports that in non-human mammals, "oxytocin receptors are distributed in various brain regions associated with behavior, including pair-bonding, maternal care, sexual behavior and normal social attachments. Thus, Oxytocin seems to permit animals to overcome their natural avoidance of proximity and thereby facilitates approach behavior." Our animal instincts seem to naturally cause us to withdraw and treat others as a foe, unless a situation arises that generates oxytocin. This phenomenon makes sense: it explains why facilitators and trainers insist on "icebreakers" at the start of workshops, and why "establish rapport" is the first step in any counseling, customer service, or sales training manual.

Foe
When you sense someone is a foe, all sorts of brain functions change. You don't interact with a perceived foe using the same brain regions you would use to process your own experience. One study showed that when you perceive someone as a competitor, you don't feel empathy with him or her. Less empathy equals less oxytocin, which means a less pleasant sensation of collaboration overall. Thinking someone is a foe can even even literally make you less smart, according to one paper published in 2002.

When you think someone is a foe, you don't just miss out on feeling their emotions, you also inhibit yourself from thinking their ideas, even if they are right. Think of a time you were angry with someone. Was it easy to see things from his or her perspective? When you decide someone is a foe, you tend to discard his or her ideas, sometimes to your detriment.

All of this points to the need to be more aware of the automatic nature of this friend / foe response, and more consciously question whether our automatic reactions to other people are always in our best interests. All this also explains why people love parades, sports games, and yes, even gruelling marathons.

PS: There's more on the organizational implications of this idea in a paper called 'Managing with the brain in mind'.

PPS: My new book 'Your brain at work' goes into relatedness, and the other goals of the brain, in lots more detail.

A Hunger for Certainty

David Rock — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:01:59 +0000

One of the more useful insights that emerged for me from five years of interviewing neuroscientists was an understanding of the brain's own goals. When I began to see what it is the brain seems to want, many aspects of the world started to make much more sense.

There are five goals that seem to be very important to the brain (not including the basic goal of keeping you alive, and physical goals like maintaining food and water etc.) These five goals form a framework I call the SCARF model. Last week I wrote about one of these goals in a post on Status. This week I will write about the need for certainty. It turns out your brain craves certainty in a similar way, and using similar circuits, for how we crave food, sex and other primary rewards. Information is rewarding.

A sense of uncertainty about the future generates a strong threat or 'alert' response in your limbic system. Your brain detects something is wrong, and your ability to focus on other issues diminishes. Your brain doesn't like uncertainty - it's like a type of pain, something to be avoided. Certainty on the other hand feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it, even when it might be better for us to remain uncertain.

A vast prediction machine
Think of the brain as a prediction machine. Massive neuronal resources are devoted to predicting what will happen each moment. Jeff Hawkins (pictured at left), inventor of the Palm Pilot and more recently founder of a neuroscience institute, explains the brain's predilection for prediction in his book On Intelligence: He writes, "Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now... Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence."

You don't just hear; you hear and predict what should come next. You don't just see; you predict what you should be seeing moment to moment. This predictive capacity, however, involves far more than just your five senses. Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief says that there are around 40 environmental cues you can consciously pay attention to at any time. Subconsciously this number is over two-million. That's a huge amount of data that can be used for prediction. The brain likes to know what is going on by recognizing patterns in the world. It likes to feel certain.

Like an addiction to anything, when the craving for certainty is met, there is a sensation of reward. At low levels, for example predicting where your foot will land as you walk, the reward is often unnoticeable (except when your foot doesn't land the way you had predicted, which equates with uncertainty.) The pleasure of prediction is more acute when you listen to music based on repeating patterns. The ability to predict, and then obtain data that meets those predictions, generates an overall toward response. It's part of the reason that mind games like solitaire, Sudoku and crosswords are enjoyable. They give you a little rush from creating more certainty in the world, in a safe way. Some people prefer cleaning the house or organizing their files to get the same kind of reward.

Selling the perception of more certainty
There are entire industries devoted to resolving larger uncertainties: from shop-front palm readers, to the mythical "black boxes" that can supposedly predict stock trends and make investors millions. Some parts of accounting and consulting make their money by helping executives experience a perception of increasing certainty, through strategic planning and "forecasting". While the financial markets of 2008 showed once again that the future is inherently uncertain, the one thing that's certain is that people will pay lots of money to at least feel less uncertain. That's because uncertainty feels, to the brain, like a threat to your life.

When you can't predict the outcome of a situation, an alert goes to the brain to pay more attention. A threat response occurs. A 2005 study found that just a little ambiguity on its own lights up the amygdale. The more ambiguity, the more threat response, and the less reward response there was in the ventral striatum. Think about someone you have spoken to a few times by phone, but never met or seen a picture of. You feel a mild uncertainty about them, yet even this tiny uncertainty seems to alter your interactions: notice how differently you interact once you know what that person looks like. Uncertainty is like an inability to create a complete map of a situation. With parts missing, you're not as comfortable as when the map is complete.

Too many futures to plan
The brain likes to think ahead and picture the future, mapping out how things will be, not just for each moment, but also for the longer term. It gets complex when there's two possible outcomes. Imagine expecting a colleague to phone you at 3pm. It's now 3.06pm. You automatically start to try to predict two futures: if he calls now, will he apologize? What made him late? Is he okay? And if he doesn't call, what should you now do with your spare hour? Flitting between these different ideas is exhausting, your brain wants to settle on one idea, not keep shifting between possible futures.

A hunger for information, just for the sake of it.
Jonah Lehrer coined a phrase I really like, called 'Information Craving'. The idea is that we crave information for the sake of it. Often that information doesn't make us more effective or adaptive, it just reduces a sense of uncertainty. Scientific American Mind magazine goes so far as to call this an 'information addiction', explainingh the chemistry of this addition in a October 2009 article. It's all about the burst of dopamine we get when a circuit is completed. It feels good - but that doesn't mean it's good for us all the time.

All of this explains many otherwise strange phenomenon. Knowing that we automatically avoid uncertainty explains why any kind of change can be hard - it's inherently uncertain. It explains why we prefer things we know over things that might be more fun, or better for us, but are new and therefore uncertain. It explains why we prefer the certainty of focusing on problems and finding answers in data from the past, rather than risking the uncertainty of new, creative solutions.

I hope this week's post has helped you be more certain about your own brain and how to get the best out of it at work. Please feel free to share any comments and feedback.

PS: If you'd like to be more certain about certainty, there's several further resources to check out. One is my new book Your Brain at Work (Some of the writing in this post is from there). You can also download the original scientific paper on the SCARF model with a full list of references. There's also a paper called 'Managing with the brain in mind' on the organizational implications of the SCARF model.

Status: a more accurate way of understanding self-esteem.

David Rock — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:24:01 +0000

Brain research is doing two things. In part it is explaining the underpinning functioning of things we already know, like the importance of mindfulness (see last week's post). However, some research also points to the need for a major overhaul in our thinking. This appears to be the case with self-esteem.

While there's no question that there's a deep human drive for a feeling of self-esteem or competence, this feeling of competence is almost never assessed on it's own: we are social beings at the core, and as such our sense of competence appears to be deeply connected to others around us. Self-esteem may not be an accurate way of understanding this feeling of 'okayness', when we actually measure this constantly against others. Instead of self-esteem, we need to start thinking about the more dynamic sense of 'status'.

Status means where are we positioned in relation to those around us: literally where we are in the ‘pecking order'. Your perception of status, and any changes in it, can be a driver of what's called primary reward or threat. A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can feel like your life is in danger. Here's an excerpt from Your Brain at Work on this whole issue.

Maintaining the status quo
Status explains why people will queue for hours on a frosty morning to get a signed copy of a TV celebrity's new book, (a book they have no plan to read). Status explains why people feel good meeting someone worse off than themselves, the German concept of "Schadenfreude", with a study showing that reward circuits activate in this situation. Status even explains why people love to win arguments, even pointless ones. Status explains a tremendous number of strange occurances in life.

Status is relative, and a sense of reward from an increase in status can come anytime you feel "better than" another person. Your brain maintains complex maps for the "pecking order" of the people surrounding you. These maps have a similar structure to how you think about numbers. Studies show that you create a representation of your own and someone else's status in the brain when you communicate, which influences how you interact with others.

Changes in a pecking order brings about changes in how millions of neurons are connected. If you have ever been in a relationship in which one partner unexpectedly begins earning more money than the other, you would have felt these wide-scale changes in brain circuitry take place, and the related challenges. Organizations set up complex and well-defined hierarchies, and then try to motivate people with the promise of moving up within that hierarchy. One company won't let you face your desk toward the window until you move from a "band 30" to a "band 35" role, even though you might sit next to a "band 35". Marketing departments use two main levers to engage human emotions: fear, and the promise of increased status.

Despite attempts by corporations to make status about the size of your car or the cost of your watch, there's no universal scale for status. When you meet someone new and size up your relative importance, you might do so based on who is older, richer, stronger, smarter, or funnier. (Or if you live in some Pacific Islands, based on who weighs more.) Whatever framework you think is important, when your perceived sense of status goes up, or down, an intense emotional response results. As a result, people go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. It operates at an individual and group level, and even at the level of countries. The desire to increase status is behind many of society's greatest achievements and some our darker hours of destruction.

On the way down
As with all emotional experiences, with status the threat response is stronger and more common than the reward response. Just speaking to someone you perceive to be of a higher status, such as your boss, can activate a strong threat response. A perceived threat to status feels like it could come with terrible consequences. The response is visceral, including a flood of cortisol to the blood and a rush of resources to the limbic system that inhibits clear thinking.

Naomi Eisenberger, a leading social neuroscience researcher at UCLA, wanted to understand what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others. She designed an experiment that used fMRI to scan the brains of participants as they played a computer game called "Cyberball." Cyberball harks back to the nastiness of the school playground. "People thought they were playing a ball tossing game over the Internet with two other people," Eisenberger explained during an interview down the road from her lab. "They could see an avatar that represented them, and avatars for two other people. Then, about half way through this game of toss between the three of them, they stop receiving the ball and the other players throw the ball only to each other." This experiment generates intense emotions for most people. Eisenberger says, "What we found is that when people were excluded, you see activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is the neural region that's also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the "suffering component" of pain. Those people who felt the most rejected had the highest levels of activity in this region." Exclusion and rejection is physiologically painful. A feeling of being less than other people, activates the same brain regions as physical pain. Eisenberger's study showed five different physical-pain brain regions lighting up under this social-pain experiment. Social pain can be as painful as physical pain, as the two appear synonymous in the brain.

The real trouble with feedback
Think of the drop in your stomach when someone says to you, "Can I give you some feedback?" It's a similar feeling to walking alone at night and sensing that someone is about to attack you from behind: perhaps not as intense but it's the same fear response. This discovery about the brain explains why people sometimes react with the human equivalent of a dog baring its teeth and growling when you tell them they've done something wrong: their brain thinks someone is about to hit them. Because of the intensity of the status-drop experience, people go to great lengths to avoid situations that might risk their sense of status. This includes staying away from any activity they are not confident in, which, because of the brain's relationship to novelty, can mean avoid anything new, impacting quality of life.

The threat response from a perceived drop in status can take on a life of its own, lasting for years. People work hard to avoid being "wrong" in a situation, from a simple typesetting mistake, to an error of judgment about a major strategy. Think of some of the big corporate mergers that have gone bad, and the executives involved avoiding any responsibility. People don't like to be wrong because being wrong drops your status, in a way that feels dangerous and unnerving.

When you decide you are right, the other person must be wrong, which means you don't listen to what he or she says, and he or she experiences you as a threat too. A vicious cycle emerges. Being "right" is often more important to people than, well, than just about anything else, at the cost of not just money but relationships, health, and sometimes even life itself.

As well as sometimes taking on a life of its own, the other trouble with status threats is how easily they can occur, generating a strong threat even in minor situations. Say you are at a meeting with a colleague, and for the first time in your working relationship, he asks to follow up with you about a project. It's likely you will interpret his request as a threat to your status: Doesn't he trust you? Is he checking up on you? Your threat response could make you say something harmful to your career. Remember that the limbic system once aroused makes accidental connections and thinks pessimistically. Just speaking to your boss arouses a threat. If you manage someone, just asking how his or her day is going can carry more emotional weight than one might think. I propose that many of the arguments and conflicts at work, and in life, have status issues at their core. The more you can label status threats as they occur, in real time, the easier it will be to respond more appropriately.

On the way up
I interviewed an international ballet dancer who used to be a member of the London Royal Ballet. She told me how she was often bored and frustrated as one of many dancers, even though she was in a world-class troupe. That all changed when she moved to a smaller, less known, troupe in her home city, but now was the leading soloist. She explained, "Finally I am the highest paid dancer in the company. I am the one at the front of the room. The minute you're at the front of the room, there's no boredom at all. The focus is on you, the space is your space, you feel at the top."

Studies of primate communities show that higher status monkeys have reduced day-to-day cortisol levels, are healthier, and live longer. This isn't just monkey business (sorry for the pun.) There is an entire book, The Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot, illustrating that status is a significant determinant of human longevity, even controlling for education and income. High status doesn't just feel good. It brings along very real rewards, too.

Status is rewarding not just when you have achieved high status, but also anytime you feel like your status has increased, even in a small way. One study showed that saying to kids "good job" in a monotonous recorded voice activated the reward circuitry in kids as much as a financial windfall. Even little status increases, like beating someone at a card game, feel great. We're wired to feel rewarded by just about any incremental increase in status. Many of the world's great narratives (and some of our not so great television franchises) have status at their core, based on two recurring themes. These stories involve either ordinary people doing extraordinary things (giving you hope you could have higher status one day) or extraordinary people doing ordinary things (giving you hope that even though may be ordinary, you are basically the same as people with high status.) Even an increase in hope that your status might go up one day seems to pack a reward.

An increase in status is one of the world's greatest feelings. Dopamine and serotonin levels go up, linked to feeling happier, and cortisol levels go down, a marker of lower stress. Testosterone levels go up too. Testosterone helps people focus, feel strong and confident, and even improves sex drive. With more dopamine and other "happy" neurochemicals, an increase in status increases the number of new connections made per hour in the brain. This means that a feeling of high status helps you process more information, including more subtle ideas, with less effort. With the reduced threat response, you are more able to think on multiple levels at once.

People with higher status are better able to follow through with their intentions more-they have more control, more support, and more attention from others. Being in a high-status state helps you make the connections that your brain expects to make, which puts you in an upward spiral toward even more positive neurochemistry. This may well be the neurochemistry of "getting on a roll."

Getting and staying on a high
You can elevate your status by finding a way to feel smarter / funnier / healthier / richer / more righteous / more organized / fitter / stronger or by beating other people at just about anything at all. The key is to find a "niche" where you feel you are "above" others.

If you video recorded a standard weekly team meeting in most organizations, you might find that a large percentage of the words spoken every are intended to edge an individual's status higher, or edge other people's status lower. This bickering, the corporate equivalent of sibling rivalry, largely happens unconsciously and wastes the cognitive resources of billions of people.

The ongoing fight for status has other downsides. While competition can make people focus, there's will always be losers in a status war. It's a zero sum game. If everyone is fighting for high status, they are likely to feel competitive, to see the other person as a threat.

If you want to have a potentially threatening conversation with someone, try talking down your own performance to help put the other person at ease. Another strategy for managing status is to help someone else feel that his or her status has gone up. Giving people positive feedback, pointing out what they do well, gives others a sense of increasing status, especially when done publicly. The trouble is, giving others people positive feedback may feel like a threat, because of a sense of a relative change in status. This may explain why, despite employees universally asking for more positive feedback, employers seem to prefer the "deficit model", pointing out people's faults and performance gaps, over a strengths-based approach.

These two strategies-putting your status down and others' up-only help other people with their status, and may actually threaten yours. So where can you get a nice burst of confidence-inducing, intelligence-boosting, performance-raising status around here, without harming children, animals, work colleagues or yourself?

Getting a status-rush without harming others' status
There's only one good (non-pharmaceutical) answer that I can find so far. It involves the idea of "playing against yourself." Why does improving your golf handicap feel so good? Because you raise your status against someone else, someone you know well. That someone is your former self. "Your sense of self comes online around the same time in life when you have sense of others. They are two sides of same coin," Marco Iacoboni explains. Thinking about yourself and thinking about others use the same circuits. You can harness the power of the thrill of "beating the other guy" by making that other guy (or girl) you, without hurting anyone in the process. To play against yourself gives you the chance to feel ever-increasing status, without threatening others. I have a hunch that many successful people have worked all this out and play against themselves a lot.

In summary - I think it's time we rethink self-esteem. Status appears to be a more accurate way of thinking about what self esteem is really about. It's a highly dynamic issue. By rethinking self-esteem we can create more accurate ways of intervening with those struggling with low status, like changing one's environment, or finding domains of life where one can experience higher status, or learning to play against yourself.

PS - If you liked this piece, check out my new book Your Brain at Work.

PPS - am on Twitter daily posting new insights and research about the brain. Find me here.

The neuroscience of mindfulness

David Rock — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:55:08 +0000

We generally think of mindfulness as an idea that has been around for thousands of years, originally emerging out of Buddhist traditions. Many Buddhist researchers are doing great studies showing that mindfulness has an impact on many aspects of human experience.

I have a bit of a problem with that. When you understand the underlying physiology of mindfulness, you begin to see that any discussion about human change, learning, education, even politics and social issues, ends up being about mindfulness. That's because mindfulness, in some ways, is simply the opposite of mindlessness. And mindlessness is the cause of a tremendous amount of human suffering.

I have a problem with something as important as deeper thinking being linked to any religion. Not because I have anything against Buddhism or against any religion at all. (Of all the organized religions, Buddhism appears to be one that generates a minimum of human conflict.) The reason I have a problem is it's hard enough getting across the idea that being mindful is useful, without activating a threat response from the billions of non-buddhists who could benefit from it.

The value of a secular approach
One of the reasons mindfulness can be difficult to talk about, in particular when discussing mindfulness with the busy people who run our companies and institutions, is that these people tend to spend little time thinking about themselves and other people, but a lot of time thinking about strategy, data, and systems. As a result, the circuits involved in thinking about oneself and other people, the medial prefrontal cortex, tend to be not too well developed. I write more about this in a paper called ‘Managing with the brain in mind' recently.

Speaking to an executive about mindfulness therefore can be a bit like speaking to a classical musician about jazz. It might look like they could play a little Coltrane, because they deal in sounds, but they don't really have the circuits for it. We don't take well to learning new skills, especially in later life, and any reason to not focus on a new skill, like it being linked to a religion other than yours, doesn't help.

I have taught mindfulness to deans of medical schools, to senior executives at major technology firms, and to MBA students from dozens of countries. When you explain step by step, how it works and how it effects your brain, and give people a chance to experience it, even the most cynical, anti-self-awareness agitator can't help but see that they will be better off practicing this skill. The key is to be able to explain the actual neuroscience involved. Here's some of the highlights of how mindfulness impacts the brain, from Your Brain at Work:

Mindfulness and the brain
A 2007 study called "Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference" by Norman Farb at the University of Toronto, along with six other scientists, broke new ground in our understanding of mindfulness from a neuroscience perspective.

Farb and his colleagues worked out a way to study how human beings experience their own moment-to-moment experience. They discovered that people have two distinct ways of interacting with the world, using two different sets of networks. One network for experiencing your experience involves what is called the "default network", which includes regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, along with memory regions such as the hippocampus. This network is called default because it becomes active when not much else is happening, and you think about yourself. If you are sitting on the edge of a jetty in summer, a nice breeze blowing in your hair and a cold beer in your hand, instead of taking in the beautiful day you might find yourself thinking about what to cook for dinner tonight, and whether you will make a mess of the meal to the amusement of your partner. This is your default network in action. It's the network involved in planning, daydreaming and ruminating.

This default network also become active when you think about yourself or other people, it holds together a "narrative". A narrative is a story line with characters interacting with each other over time. The brain holds vast stores of information about your own and other people's history. When the default network is active, you are thinking about your history and future and all the people you know, including yourself, and how this giant tapestry of information weaves together. In this way, in the Farb study they like to call the default network the ‘narrative' circuitry. (I like the ‘narrative circuit' term for every-day usage as it's easier to remember and a bit more elegant than ‘default' when talking about mindfulness.)

When you experience the world using this narrative network, you take in information from the outside world, process it through a filter of what everything means, and add your interpretations. Sitting on the dock with your narrative circuit active, a cool breeze isn't a cool breeze, it's a sign than summer will be over soon, which starts you thinking about where to go skiing, and whether your ski suit needs a dry clean.

The default network is active for most of your waking moments and doesn't take much effort to operate. There's nothing wrong with this network, the point here is you don't want to limit yourself to only experiencing the world through this network.

The Farb study shows there is a whole other way of experiencing experience. Scientists call this type of experience one of direct experience. When the direct experience network is active, several different brain regions become more active. This includes the insula, a region that relates to perceiving bodily sensations. The anterior cingulate cortex is also activated, which is a region central to switching your attention. When this direct experience network is activated, you are not thinking intently about the past or future, other people, or yourself, or considering much at all. Rather, you are experiencing information coming into your senses in real time. Sitting on the jetty, your attention is on the warmth of the sun on your skin, the cool breeze in your hair, and the cold beer in your hand.

A series of other studies has found that these two circuits, narrative and direct experience, are inversely correlated. In other words, if you think about an upcoming meeting while you wash dishes, you are more likely to overlook a broken glass and cut your hand, because the brain map involved in visual perception is less active when the narrative map is activated. You don't see as much (or hear as much, or feel as much, or sense anything as much) when you are lost in thought. Sadly, even a beer doesn't taste as good in this state.

Fortunately, this scenario works both ways. When you focus your attention on incoming data, such as the feeling of the water on your hands while you wash up, it reduces activation of the narrative circuitry. This explains why, for example, if your narrative circuitry is going crazy worrying about an upcoming stressful event, it helps to take a deep breath and focus on the present moment. All your senses "come alive" at that moment.

Let's recap these ideas. You can experience the world through your narrative circuitry, which will be useful for planning, goal setting, and strategizing. You can also experience the world more directly, which enables more sensory information to be perceived. Experiencing the world through the direct experience network allows you to get closer to the reality of any event. You perceive more information about events occurring around you, as well as more accurate information about these events. Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how you respond to the world. You also become less imprisoned by the past, your habits, expectations or assumptions, and more able to respond to events as they unfold.

In the Farb experiment, people who regularly practiced noticing the narrative and direct experience paths, such as regular meditators, had stronger differentiation between the two paths. They knew which path they were on at any time, and could switch between them more easily. Whereas people who had not practiced noticing these paths were more likely to automatically take the narrative path.

This isn't just a theory. A study by Kirk Brown found that people high on a mindfulness scale were more aware of their unconscious processes. Additionally these people had more cognitive control, and a greater ability to shape what they do and what they say, than people lower on the mindfulness scale. If you're on the jetty in the breeze and you're someone with a good level or mindfulness, you are more likely to notice that you're missing a lovely day worrying about tonight's dinner, and focus your attention onto the warm sun instead. When you make this change in your attention, you change the functioning of your brain, and this can have a long-term impact on how your brain works too.

Why we need to keep being reminded about mindfulness
John Teasdale, recently retired, was one of the leading mindfulness researchers. Teasdale explains, "Mindfulness is a habit, it's something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort... it's a skill that can be learned. It's accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn't difficult. What's difficult is to remember to be mindful." I love this last statement. Mindfulness isn't difficult: the hard part is remembering to do it.

Practice, but you don't have to sit down and breathe.
So practicing mindfulness is important, as you're more likely to then remember to do it.
The key to practicing mindfulness is just to practice focusing your attention onto a direct sense, and to do so often. It helps to use a rich stream of data. You can hold your attention to the feeling of your foot on the floor easier than the feeling of your little toe on the floor: there's more data to tap into. You can practice mindfulness while you are eating, walking, talking, doing just about anything, with the exception of drinking a beer in the sun, which works for only a limited time before your attention leaves to go and party (the neuroscience of all that will have to wait for another book.)

Building mindfulness doesn't mean you have to sit still and watch your breath. You can find a way that suits your lifestyle. My wife and I built a 10 second ritual into the evening meal with my kids, which involves just stopping and noticing three small breaths together before we eat. The added bonus is it makes a great dinner taste even better.

What ever practice you do develop, practice it. The more mindful you become, the better decisions you will make, and the more you will achieve your own goals, rather than other people's goals for you.

Next week I am going to post on why it's so hard to stop ourselves doing and thinking certain things: the neuroscience of our (rather weakly) mental braking system.

Commercial Plug: if you like the insights and tone of this post, check out my new book Your Brain at Work, just out last week. The post this week is an edited excert of one of 14 chapters explaining complex neuroscience insights in everyday language.

Easily distracted: why it's hard to focus, and what to do about it

David Rock — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:46:53 +0000

My new book 'Your Brain at Work' is out this week, so I thought I would share one of the ideas from the book that's been having the biggest impact: how to manage distractions.

If you are paid to answer emails or deal with customers all day then this post might not be for you. But if you're someone who often needs to get some thinking done, read on...

An epidemic of overwhelm
People everywhere seem to be experiencing an epidemic of overwhelm at work. I believe it's a function of two things. Firstly it's the amount of information we now process, which our brain may not be used to. I read somewhere that The New York Times on Sunday contains more information than the average 18th century French Nobleman learned in his lifetime (now, if only I could remember where I read that...)

Secondly, we have all these new technologies which are very good at distracting us, which our human habits have not caught up to. The challenge is that we have not realized the true cost of distractions: they use up what is actually a limited supply of attention each day, and make us far less effective if we need to do deeper thinking work. For example, a university of London study found that being always connected impacts your IQ equivalent to losing a night's sleep or taking up marijuana.

Attention is a limited resource
Every time you focus your attention you use a measurable amount of glucose and other metablic resources. Studies show that each task you do tends to make you less effective at the next task, and this is especially true for high-energy tasks like self control or decision making. So distractions really take their toll.

Here's more on this from the book:

Distractions are everywhere. And with the always-on technologies of today, they take a heavy toll on productivity. One study found that office distractions eat an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every three minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.

Distractions are not just frustrating; they can be exhausting. By the time you get back to where you were, your ability to stay focused goes down even further as you have even less glucose available now. Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as much as 20 times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what's possible. Less energy equals less capacity to understand, decide, recall, memorize, and inhibit. The result could be mistakes on important tasks. Or distractions can cause you to forget good ideas and lose valuable insights. Having a great idea and not being able to remember it can be frustrating, like an itch you can't scratch, yet another distraction to manage.

Remove temptation
So how can we address this?
The answer is quite simple. Once you understand how much energy is involved in high-level thinking like planning and creating, you might be more vigilant about allowing distractions to steal your attention. One of the most effective distraction-management techniques is switch off all communication devices during any thinking work. Your brain prefers to focus on things right in front of you. It's less effort. If you are trying to focus on a subtle mental thread, allowing yourself to be distracted is like stopping pain and enjoying a mild pleasure: it's too hard to resist! Blocking out external distractions altogether, especially if you get a lot of them, seems to be one of the best strategies for improving mental performance. There is no 'trick' to this: you simply must switch things off, or you wont focus.

So part of the solution to managing distractions is quite easy in theory, it just takes some courage. It's also not negotiable: there's no way not to be distracted by distractions, it's built into the brain in the way we pay attention to novelty.

Distractions are not just external though. Here's more from Your Brain at Work:

Awash with activity
As adolescence hits and you become more conscious of an inner life, many people notice that their mind is hard to control. Strange thoughts pop into awareness at odd moments. The mind likes to wander, like a young puppy sniffing around here and there. As frustrating as this tendency can be, it's normal and it tends to stay this way through life. One reason for your wandering attention is that the nervous system is constantly processing, reconfiguring, and reconnecting the trillions of connections in your brain each moment. The term for this is "ambient neural activity". If you were to look at the electrical activity even in a resting brain, it would look like planet earth from space with electrical storms lighting up different regions several times a second.

Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli, two neuroscientists from MIT, studied what happens in the brain when people are distracted by internal thoughts when doing difficult tasks. They found that lapses in attention impair performance, independent of what the task is, and that these lapses in attention involve activating the medial prefrontal cortex. The medial prefrontal cortex is located within the prefrontal cortex itself, around the middle of your forehead. It activates when you think about yourself and other people. This region of the brain is also part of what is called the "default" network. This network becomes active when you are not doing much at all, such as being in between activities while in a scanner. Hedden and Gabrieli found that when you lose external focus, this default brain network activates and your attention goes to more internal signals, such as being more aware of something that may be bothering you.

Driving away from distractions
You might wonder how you ever stay focused. We have specific neural circuitry for this process, though it doesn't work the way you might expect. A key part of maintaining good focus occurs based on how well you inhibit the wrong things from coming into focus.

A common test that neuroscientists use to study the act of focusing is the "stroop" test. Volunteers are given words printed in different colors, and told to read out the color of the text, not the word itself. In the example below, the brain has a strong desire to answer "Grey" for option c., as it's easier for the brain to read a word than to identify a color.

a. Black
b. Grey
c. Grey
d. Black

To not read the word "Grey" requires inhibition of an automatic response. Using scanning technologies neuroscientists have observed people inhibiting their natural responses, and discovered the brain networks that are activated when this happens. There is one specific region within the prefrontal cortex that keeps showing up as being central for all types of inhibition. It's called the right and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), and it sits just behind the right and left temple. The VLPFC inhibits many types of responses. When you inhibit a motor response, a cognitive response or an emotional response, this region becomes active. It appears that the brain has many different ‘accelerators', with different parts of the brain involved in language, emotions, movement, and memories. Yet there is only one central braking system used for all types of braking.

Your ability to use this braking system well, the VLPFC, seems to correlate closely to how well you can focus. It seems that to focus we need to learn to stop ourselves from going down the wrong path. One of the challenges with this process though is that this braking system isn't very effective.

Putting on the breaks
If you were a car company and were building a new type of on-road vehicle you would make sure the braking system was made out of the most robust materials possible, because brake failure is not a happy thing. Well in the case of human brains, the opposite has happened. Our braking system is part of the most fragile, temperamental and energy-hungry region of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. Because of this, your braking system only works at its best every now and then. If cars were built like this you'd never survive your first drive down to the store. All this makes sense when you consider it: stopping yourself from acting on an urge is something you can do sometimes, but is often not that easy. Not thinking about an annoying, intrusive thought at times can be very difficult. And staying focused, well sometimes that appears downright impossible.

Timing is of the essence
So, inhibiting distractions is a core skill for staying focused. To inhibit distractions, you need to be aware of your internal mental process and catch the wrong impulses before they take hold. It turns out that, like the old saying goes, timing is everything. Once you take an action, an energetic loop commences that makes it harder to stop that action. Many activities have built-in rewards, in the form of increased arousal that holds your attention. Once you open your email program and see the messages from people you know, it's so much harder to stop yourself from reading them. Most motor or mental acts also generate their own momentum. Decide to get out of your chair and the relevant brain regions, as well as dozens of muscles, are all activated. Blood starts pumping and energy moves around. To stop getting out of your chair once you start will take more focus and effort than to decide not to get up when you first have the urge. To avoid distractions it's helpful to get into the habit of stopping the wrong behaviors early, quickly, and often, well before they take over.

And here's a big take away from all this. Manage what you focus on. Pay attention to your attention, and stop yourself from getting on the wrong train of thought early, before it takes over. This is the oppositive of being mindless: it's being mindful.

The best way to do that is to practice being aware of your own thoughts, by activating your observer function. How do you do that, when you have a ton of information pouring through your head as you process a hundred emails in the morning? The answer is clear: you can't. If you want to do deeper thinking work, don't start your day overwhelming and exhausting your brain. Start with the tougher work that requires a more focused, quiet mind. Many people have this back to front. If your job is to think, tackle thinking tasks early, and tasks that are relatively 'interesting' such as checking your emails (which means your brain will go there easily) later when you are tired.

So in summary, how do you beat back distractions? Turn everything off. And do your deeper thinking work in the morning while you still have the ability to control your attention. Sounds easy enough. In practice it's tough, but it works.

Next week I will post about the neuroscience of mindfulness, explaining mindfulness in a simple and practical way, and illustrate how being mindful affects the brain in the short and long term.

PS: If you want to connect in person, this week I am running several free telecall events about the insights within my new book, at times suitable worldwide. Anyone can join.

Why millions of brains love (and hate) twitter

David Rock — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:28:55 +0000

A few nights ago I did some laps of a hotel pool in the hope of generating insights to reenergize my tired brain. (The promise of fresh ideas is how I trick myself into exercising, as I wrote about last week.)

As my heavy breathing subsided, I found myself staring at a rather beautiful and very large tree. This isn't unusual, except that I was 11 stories up in the middle of a big city. The tree was in a pot big enough to hide several people in.

I stared at the tree for several minutes. It looked like a piece of fractal art in the false light. I found myself thinking how wonderful it was that the tree knew just what to do when it was planted there. All it needed was the right conditions, soil, water and light, and it would do what trees do, grow, and make the otherwise drab concrete area more interesting to the eye.

It started to make me wonder about the conditions that are making Twitter grow all by itself, from nothing to something like six million users in a very short time. Here's my thoughts on this from the perspective of the brain, and a bit on the dark side of Twitter too.

Simplicity is it's own reward
To me, Twitter is the Google of social media. Part of Google's success is that in the early days it bet on a very different approach to online advertising. When everyone else was doing banner ads, Google decided to limit advertising to a small fixed number of characters. No pictures, no fluff.

This was very insightful. It made search results load a tiny bit faster. When you expect something to happen, and then have to wait for it, the unmet expectation can generate a slight threat response, which you feel as frustration. Also there's the frustration inherent in the uncertainty of not knowing what's happening while the page loads. On the other hand, when expectation are met in a timely way, the brain experiences a mild reward. The research behind this was done by Wolfram Schultz, who studied dopamine levels when rewards were expected, unexpected or the same.

On Google, millions of users felt a tiny fraction less frustration when searching because of this faster speed, and the rest is history. Twitter is onto the same thing. It's fast. Much faster to simply load a page than most other social media sites. It makes the site inherantly more rewarding. Facebook has been onto this insight lately, with the launch of Facebook lite.

There's another similarity to Google. On Twitter you can scroll down very quickly to overview many different ideas, choosing what's relevant to you. This pared-down approach is helpful is because of the brain's scanning function. We like to scan lots of information at high level, then choose to focus in on what's relevant or important to us. This is important as we can't focus on everything. So the less information we need to process to identify if something is relevant, the less work the brain has to do to find rewards.

Another reason why Twitter is working so well, again similar to Google, is the simplicity of the page. There's hardly anything there to distract you. Simplicity can be it's own reward. It is certainty better than generating uncertainty, which tends to be a threat. This kind of insight can be useful when designing new products or marketing campaigns. Simplicity isn't alway easy, but it can often be very rewarding.

The brain loves a good gossip
Your brain is immensely social. Here's an excerpt on this from Your Brain at Work:

If you were a wolf, large parts of your brain would be devoted to getting resources directly from the wild. You would have complex maps for interacting with the physical landscape, like maps for sniffing out a distant meal and others for finding your way home in the dark. As a human, especially when young, you get your resources not from the wild, but from other people. Because of this, large amounts of human cortical "real estate" is devoted to the social world. If you work in an office, you could probably close your eyes and describe ten people around you, how important they are in relation to each other and to you, how they feel today, whether they can be trusted, and how many favors any of them might owe you. Your memories of your social interconnections are vast.

We are rewarded when we activate this vast social network, the one in our heads, which is activated when we go to a social media site. However Twitter is a little different. It's almost like a place of whispers rather than shouting, the posts are like gossip, with lots left unsaid. (In fact some of the most popular posts are celebrity gossip.) And Gossip is something that the brain likes to do. As neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman says, "Four out of five processes operating in the background when your brain is at rest involve thinking about other people and yourself." Twitter gives people a chance to gossip without leaving their desk. You get to see who is linked to who, without needing to dig into any details, and without anyone knowing.

Cheap and quick status building
A third reason that perhaps Twitter is growing so fast is it taps into people's desire to grow their status. Some clues to this can be found in a survey on Twitter in Fast Company recently, called ‘Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter'. Here's the cliff notes: people retweet things that make them look smart.
This is one of the key aspects of Twitter: it's all about building your status. People use twitter to look good in the eyes of others, and to feel that they are important to others. A sense of increasing status is one of the biggest drivers of reward in the brain, as I wrote about recently in a cover story for a business journal, strategy+business (telling you the story was on the cover is good for my feeling of status too.) On Twitter, every time another person signs up to 'follow' you, you feel a little burst of reward that makes you want to post more. Everyone now gets the chance to feel important, even if non one is reading your posts.

The dark side of twitter
There's another side to Twitter though: It can be highly addictive. This kind of media activates the ‘seeking' circuits of the brain, that makes you want more and more, never feeling satisfied. It's a bit like sugar: you crave it but it's not really good for you. There's a great piece explaining the deeper neuroscience of this in Slate recently.

The problem is that the type of reward you get from Twitter seems to activate a kind of scattered, jumpy feeling. I haven't seen research on this yet, but I have noticed it in myself. If I have something to write, I'd much rather just hang out on Twitter and look around a while first. And when I then try to write, I find my brain isn't in the right gear, it's overly stimulated. It reminds of the research on being ‘always on' that Linda Stone (who coined the term 'continuous partial attention) has published on. A University of London study found that being always connected was reducing people's IQ equivalent to losing a night's sleep or taking up marijuana. I can't speak of the latter, but as a frequent traveler know the feeling of the former. It does indeed feel, after time on Twitter, like I haven't slept and can't focus on harder tasks.

So the answer to this I think is to manage your twitterings carefully, if it's something you want to do. I do find it useful for gathering ideas, for seeing trends, and knowing what's happening in my own field, plus for connecting with people I wouldn't otherwise, all of which can be great for generating more positive dopamine as I wrote about a few weeks ago. It just has to be used carefully.

Coming up...
In the next few weeks I am going to post about managing distractions, and why your brain loves and hates email. Am also working on a piece on why positive changes seem to sometimes get strong reactions from people. And if you can't wait till next week to see what's going on in my head, connect with me on Twitter, where I do post musings daily (and I indeed try, and sometimes fail, to only log on here and there...).